When sorted by last date played, my list (including the songs played
4 times to round out the top 25) clumps together: most of these spots
on the list were achieved on a single one of five or so different days,
when I must have been listening obsessively to the same songs over and
over. Some of those days are in July, which must have coincided with
the first time I started ripping CDs. One day a number of songs were
last played was December 26, which probably means that I was at my
parents' house without very much music to listen to, apart from what was
on my computer.

The number one song was last played on December 26, but my computer
doesn't take into account the handful of mixes I've burnt the song
onto since then, or the gajillion times I've heard it from one of
those CDs since then. It is the best song ever recorded ever.

'Adorno's own pedagogical efforts were of course primarily located within
the department of philosophy. One of his functions was that of an examiner
of future high school teachers, who had to pass a general examination in
philosophy (Philosophicum) before they were admitted to the general
examinations in their field of specialization (Staatsexamen). In his
capacity as an examiner for the state, Adorno had to deal with students who
for the most part studied philosophy only in order to pass the Philosophicum.
As he points out in his essay 'Philosophie und Lehrer', these students
usually showed no special interest in and little appreciation of philosophical
discourse. For them, the examination was nothing but a hurdle they had to
overcome in order to receive their professional licenses. Adorno, on the
other hand, thought the exam should prove that the candidate was able to
understand and to discuss philosophical problems within a larger cultural
context. He mentions the case of a student who chose to be examined about
Henri Bergson but was completely unable to situate the texts she had selected,
or to detect any link between Bergson and Impressionist painting. Adorno
uses this example to demonstrate an approach to philosophy that altogether
undercuts the purpose of the exam. By restricting her attention exclusively
to the content, the candidate reified its meaning. Instead of relating to
the text and its problems, she could at best reproduce the opinions of the
philosopher. What Adorno's essay deplores more than the students' lack of
extensive familiarity with the philosophical canon is their stubborn refusal
to enter into philosophical dialogue with their teachers and examiners.
For this reason, philosophy remains for them a mere object of study, not a
mental exercise and intellectual experience. In other words, their attitude
is that of specialists whose consciousness is largely ossified; they do not
reach the level of active self-reflection (lebendige Selbstbesinnung).

Because Adorno wants the preliminary examination in philosophy to function
as an intellectual exercise in which the candidate, through a dialogue with
the examiner, demonstrates his or her grasp of the problems involved in the
reading of the assigned text, he emphasizes the process of reflection rather
than the factual result. The examination, he points out, is designed to find
out whether the candidate, while reflecting on his or special field, can
move beyond the range of the prepared material. Adorno continues: 'To put
it simply, the question is whether they are spiritual human beings [
geistige Menschen], if the term "spiritual human beings" would not have
certain arrogant connotations, reminding us of elitist desires to dominate,
desires that prevent the academic teacher from achieving self-determination'.
Indeed, terms such as geisteger Mensch and geistige Bildung
(spiritual self-formation) do have problematic connotations, invoking the
kind of pre-war idealism that Adorno scorned. Nevertheless, he seems unable
to do without them, since they refer to a project of Bildung of
which philosophers such as Johann Fichte, Friedrich Schelling, and Wilhelm
von Humboldt were representative. Thus it is not accidental that the essay
contains an extensive quotation from Fichte's writings. The element of
German idealism that Adorno wants to rescue is the moment of reflexivity:
that is, self-understanding through the understanding of cultural texts.
Though he can be highly critical of the absolute claims of idealism, in
his instance he almost identifies with Fichte's definition of philosophical
training as an antidote to the implicit positivist tendencies of his own time.'

Sitting here in the coffeeshop, I've noticed that the woman sitting next
to me is looking too openly at the other people around her. But then again,
I've also noticed that I probably had to do a bit of looking to determine
that.

200Warning to writers and teachers. - He who has once written, and
feels in himself the passion of writing, acquires from almost all he
does and experiences only that which can be communicated through writing.
He no longer thinks of himself but of the writer and his public: he desires
insight, but not for his own private use. He who is a teacher is usually
incapable of any longer doing anything for his own benefit, he always thinks
of the benefit of his pupils, and he takes pleasure in knowledge of any
kind only insofar as he can teach it. He regards himself in the end as
a thoroughfare of knowledge and as a means and instrument in general, so
that he has ceased to be serious with regard to himself.

I. Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with
himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that will not
prejudice the next.

II. Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read
from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in
this way will slacken your tempo. If this regime is followed, the growing
desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.

III. In your working conditions, avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation,
to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand,
accompaniment by an étude or a cacophony of voices can become as
significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the
latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction
simple enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.

IV. Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain
papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these
utensils is indespensible.

V. Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly
as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

VI. Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract
with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea,
the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech
conquers thought, but writing commands it.

VII. Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary
honor requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime,
a meeting) or at the end of the work.

VIII. Fill the lacunae in your inspiration by tidily copying out what
you have already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.

IX. Nulla dies sine linea - but there may well be weeks.

X. Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from
evening to broad daylight.

XI. Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study.
You would not find the necessary courage there.

XII. Stages of composition: idea - style - writing. The value of the
fair copy is that in producing you confine attention to calligraphy.
The idea kills inspiration; style fetters the idea; writing pays off
style.

Things on McCoy Tyner's first album sound thin. Though I know that
this is in part due to his playing, to the way it had yet to develop
into what I expect from his later (after 1962) time with Coltrane,
at the moment I feel like attributing a lot to Art Davis, perhaps
totally without reason. There are plenty of passages where Davis walks
and Tyner tools along just fine, but missing Jimmy Garrison's thing for
pulses, suspensions of movement for Tyner to dig into, I keep getting
the sense that the ground is missing.

Maybe the point of criticism, Maryann says, is to help us stop being thrilled by literature. And if that seems prima facie wrong—thinking maybe about all those times you've seen a book or a poem in a new light, come to find something sweet or clever or impressive about it, because of something a critic said—don't forget to compare those moments of appreciation to the
complex relationships you have that outstrip, laughably so, mere
'appreciation', to the books that you read five, ten, fifty times, the ones that you never stop reading, the ones that infect and inflect all your subsequent thoughts, the ones in which you find for the first time someone writing things that you never before suspected anyone else in the world might have thought, except you. You know, whatever. Those books. What I say about them is loaded, to say the least, for—what if it's not such a positive thing, to have that kind of a book? To become mired in it, tied to it, forever affected by its gravity? And not merely because of the subsequent effect of it on your etc. etc.—not in that sense. No; in that, in that brighter book's sun everything else is dimmed. Including, most selfishly (i.e. not some liberal humanist line about the greatness of great literature and tradition and whatever), your own experiences of reading. Of reading whatever, anything. Even these can be brightened, but it takes hard work and dedication and commitment and openness, big things to call for in the face of the resentment and malaise that come of reading book after book where it just doesn't click, and you get the tired feeling of reading yet another book about which you will have yet more thoughts which you
will recall a few of, perhaps, a few months on down the road if you are lucky. Even where the most abstractly intellectual is concerned, you want the lightning. And you want it to strike you down dead in your place. You want to be that moved. That affected.